Royce's Random Thoughts

Turns out that Foxers of Beariefs, which included my story "A Brief Distraction" won Best Anthology in the Furry Book Review's 2019 Leo Awards. 

Go me.

 Short Version: Go see this movie. Right now. I'd put this up as one of the best, if not THE BEST Marvel movies, and that includes all of the MCU.

Randomly Spoilerly Comments.
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1. Miles is Spider-Man. Terribly young, terribly afraid, but willing to do the right thing, even if his friends and mentors feel he'd be safer staying to one side.

2. Liked the interaction between Miles and his dad. It definitely felt like his father loved him and wanted to connect to Miles, but was just stumbling as to how.

3. Miles' uncle was a cool contrast, the appealing, chill, and slightly crooked opposite of his brother, and their interactions also felt genuine, making his eventual fate even more painful. 

4. Peter B. Parker was both simultaneously funny and tragic. This is a Spider-Man who has been in the costume for over twenty years, and is visibly tired of the grind. As one reviewer put it, he's the genius kid who peaked in high school and has been living in the glory days ever since. But he's still a hero, and as the movie makes a point of, Spider-Man always gets up again no matter how many times he's knocked down.

5. Aunt May was incredibly cool. The easy characterization would have been to make her devastated over the loss of "her" Peter, but when she sees Peter B. she immediately realizes what's going on, and becomes the clever ally of him, Miles, and the other Spiders.

6. All of  the Spiders, even the cynical Peter B. and Noir Spider-Man, and silly Spider-Ham, are heroes. Their immediate reaction when faced with the situation is stopping Kingpin and keeping poor Miles out of trouble. They may all be different, but they're all the Spider-Man/Woman/Girl/Pig we love.

7. Oh, God.. The animation blew my mind. I'm willing to say it's more innovative than even a Pixar film, and that's saying something.

8. If the movie has one fault, it's that it's got too many villains. The main three, Kingpin, Dr. Octavious, and Prowler, are done well enough, but Green Goblin, Scorpion, and Tombstone are barely sketches.

9. Didn't realize until now the significance of Miles' final Spider suit. He takes the backup of his world's Spider-Man and spray paints it, literally "tagging" Spider-Man, making it, and Spider-Man's legacy, his own.

10. Stay through the credits. Aside from a tribute to Stan Lee that will make you sniffle a bit, the last two Spider-Men we see made me laugh my ass off.

I’m... ambivalent ... about the MST3K reboot.




Like pretty much every other TV viewer on the planet, I was thrilled at the success of the MST3K Kickstarter back in 2015, and eager to finally see new episodes after a nearly 20 year hiatus consisting of illegal YouTube uploads and periodic Rhino Video and Shout Factory DVD releases of the old series. But I was also hesitant. Even with Joel Hodgson back on board, and the eventual backing of Netflix, which has a happy of back off kilter programming, I had doubts. Catching lightning in a bottle twice is always an iffy proposition.




Several months after the release of the new show on Netflix, I’m still on the fence about it. On an individual basis, the episodes are just fine. There are some standouts (“Reptilicus”, “Starcrash”, “Yongary”, “At the Earth’s Core” ), some that are just ok (“Cry Wilderness”, “Avalanche”, “The Land That Time Forgot”, “Wizards of the Lost Kingdom I & II”, “The Loves of Hercules”) and some I won’t watch again (“Cry Wilderness”, “Carnival Magic”, “The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t”, “The Time Travellers”), but nothing that is outright unwatchable even with the a host and the bots (Stuff like “The Castle of Fu Manchu” from the old series). Riffing terrible (or at least *odd*) movies can rarely go badly, especially with a competent team writing the jokes, and they’ve got that. It’s the bits in between that bother me.




Honestly, I think the move from Minnesota to Los Angeles worked in the show’s disfavor. Even knowing it had to be spruced up a bit to accommodate moving from 4:3 video to 16:9 HD formatting, everything seems too *slick* now. The host segments remind me painfully of the first Wayne’s World movie, where our heroes move from filming on a camcorder in their parents ‘ basement to a professionally recreated set resembling their parents’ basement, and the results are as awkward and false as you can imagine. Instead of a handmade Midwestern charm, we’ve got a Hollywood recreation of handmade Midwestern charm.




On the previous show practically the entire cast consisted of the writing staff and whatever interns they could drag onto the set for bit parts. Now we have genuine actors Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt as the Mads, Internet personality Jonah Ray as our kidnap victim/test subject, and two Jim Henson veterans working the bots. And while previously the only Special Guest Stars were Leonard Maltin and a walk on by a Minnesota Vikings linebacker, we’ve got one appearing Every. Single. Episode. And it’s just as distracting as I feared when I realized it was going to be a thing.




On a more nitpicky basis I’m not fond of Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt as the Mads. Instead of the mildly goofy evil of Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank, or the cheerfully twisted family of Pearl, Prof. Bobo and Brain Guy, we’ve got Kinga and Max/Son of Frank. Kinga just comes across as desperate to be as evil as Grandma and Dad [1], and Max is just... kinda there, lacking either Frank Mk. 1’s mellow absurdity, or Brain Guy and Bobo’s outright insanity.




The host segments come across as scripted and lacking the occasional off the cuff improvisation of the original. Some of that can be probably chalked up to them, all of them, apparently being filmed in one really long shooting day, but they come across as having been scripted so tightly any spontaneity died in the writer’s room. [2]




Don’t get me wrong, I think the new MST3K is funny. It’s impossible for this show, rebooted or no, *not* to be funny. But the old MST3K was funny and *charming*. The new one... isn’t.




[1] Seriously, anybody who has a house band in their secret lab is just trying too hard.



[2] I’m trying, and failing, to imagine the new show doing anything as Only a Liberal Arts Major Will Get It absurd as Sci-Fi Channel Era Mike and the Bots doing a Sven and Ollie joke in the style of Ingmar Bergman.

Summary: Penric, Sorcerer of the Bastard, though only tangentially of the Bastard’s Order, has been in possession of his demon, Desdemona, for eleven years since the events of this series’ first novella, “Penric’s Demon”. Older, wiser, and wanting to be well away from his old post at Martensbridge, his new duty as a courier turns out not to be all that it could, seeing as it lands him in an oubliette as soon as he arrives distant, sunny Cedonia.

( Cut for very minor spoilers )

Just got back from a sensory friendly (house lights were up, no 3-D, no THX) showing at our local theater for autistic kids. Suffice it to say it was equal or better than the first two movies combined.

( Spoilers obviously )

Summary: In Astro City, home of fifty years of comics history that's never really been published, Carl Donewicz AKA Steeljack, an 800-pound man with a body made of living steel and with a face like a chromed Robert Mitchum, is the villainous goon that might show up when the writer needs a random heavy. Except he just got out after a twenty-year stint in the joint and this time he's determined to go straight. But what's an ex-con to do who doesn't have the brains for an office job or enough control over his strength to keep from snapping dishes when he tries to wash them at a diner?

Well, turns out that someone in his old neighborhood is hunting down some of the other "black masks", two-bit, third-rate crooks with a bit of tech or training, but without the class to ever make it big. He may not have the brains to be a detective, but one thing Steeljack does have is the ability to really take a punch and stay on the case.

( review spoilers behind the cut )

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.
-A Scanner Darkly, author's afterword.

The interesting thing about Scanner, PKD's autobiographical novel about the slow, gradual, terrible destruction of Bob Arctor, a cop in a world so paranoid about drug abuse and security that he ends up working undercover to investigate himself, is that how little actual science fiction is in it. There's mention of a broken "'ceph scope" (an expensive toy that evidentally surface scans your mind), and the interesting idea of the Scramble Suits, which the police use to hide their identities even from themselves, to avoid the attention of murderous drug pushers and of course the fictional Substance D itself, but beyond those toys the story is barely sci-fi at all.

What Scanner is really about is an examination of the drug culture as PKD experienced it in the late sixties. He and his friends were out to have a good time, and the best way to have was using drugs. But the brief pleasures that they received were paid for ten fold over by the destruction that the drugs brought down on their minds and bodies. They hardly need to be hassled by the police (indeed, the cops tend to be watchers in this book, observing but rarely intervening). The bad trips, wasted lives and physical destruction wrought on their bodies is punishment enough. PKD is upfront about this. Though in the afterword he claims to make no judgement about either side in this proto-War on Drugs, the painful, naked detail he records when he describes drug users losing their minds, or Arctor's physical and mental breakdown as he goes cold turkey off Substance D, is indictment enough. The price for the pleasures recieved is too high, far too high.

Summary: Trapped inside the massive Aperture Science testing facility, our heroine Chell must outwit her passive/aggressive test monitor, GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) armed only with her wits and a gun that can rip open holes in space.

( It is either the best game of the year or a really bad example of a failed lesbian relationship )